Female Bonding, Punctuated by Gunfire; Every First Monday, a Shooting Club Contradicts a New York Stereotype

In New York City, it is a rule of thumb among the legal community that the First Amendment comes first, and the Second Amendment comes last.

New York is not a gun town. With some of the toughest gun laws in the country, it can take upward of 18 months to get a license for your longarm, even if the most you care to do is head upstate for a weekend turkey shoot.

There is, though, a small but enthusiastic shooting culture in the city, and one place to find its members is at meetings of the Women's Shooting Sports League, which gathers the first Monday of each month in Chelsea for a night of rifle fire and female bonding.

''When people think of gun owners, they think of butt-scratching bubbas with no teeth,'' said Amy Heath, the league's founder. ''Women in the heartland shoot well, so why not women in New York?''

It may be that no breed of humanity is less friendly to the firearm than the female Manhattanite, and yet the league, which began last year with only five members, has expanded this year to a core of 15 to 20 regulars, Ms. Heath said.

They meet at the Westside Rifle and Pistol Range on West 20th Street, where they learn the rudiments of firearm safety from instructors and spend an hour or so cooking off a few hundred rounds of ammunition on the line.

To Ms. Heath, who is 33 and went into making television documentaries after giving up an acting career, the league is the culmination of a childhood spent among guns.

She was born in San Diego, moved to Plano, Tex., and spent her adolescence in Rochester, Mich., 40 minutes north of Detroit -- a gun-friendly community, she said.

''There's this fear, this incessant fear, that guns are bad,'' she said. ''Women think they'll shoot themselves in the foot, or shoot someone else. I want to work against that fear.''

She comes from the appropriate stock. Her grandfather, Jeff Cooper (U.S.M.C., retired), sits on the board of the National Rifle Association and is widely considered the father of modern pistol technique. Mr. Cooper also writes ''Jeff Cooper's Commentaries,'' a regular Internet newsletter where one can find his blunt, plainspoken musings on the world, which recently included this:

''Bear in mind that it is more blessed to give than to receive. I know a certain amount about naval gunfire, and I am certainly impressed with the truth of that proposition.''

If it is tricky to imagine some Manhattan publicist in miniskirt and leather boots taking target practice with a Ruger .22, consider what Ms. Heath's relations in Michigan think about her current home.

There is much to learn from the league about the failure of assumptions. While one might assume, for instance, that the city's reputation for tolerance extends to all manner of behavior, it apparently does not extend to a love of guns.

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''It's tough to be a shooter down here,'' said Peter Crowell, a 60-year-old management consultant and a volunteer instructor for the league. ''New York is, of course, primarily a liberal Democratic kind of place, and over years I've had to hide my interest.

''If you've never taken delivery of a hundred rounds of small-arms ammunition at your apartment,'' he went on coyly with a smile, ''I can tell you, it's a treat.''

At the same time, it would be wrong to assume that the members of the league are all of the Republican persuasion or even interested in their Second Amendment right to bear arms.

''I consider myself the opposite of people in rooms like this,'' said Julia Cohen, a constitutional lawyer who recently joined the league. ''I'm a Democrat. I'm a liberal. And I believe that guns are dangerous in the wrong hands.''

Ms. Cohen said she considered shooting a precision art form, much like darts, and found her time with the Ruger an ''almost Zen sort of thing.'' Although she said that politics were far from her mind when she joined, she discovered that the task of getting licensed was much more difficult than she had thought.

While filling out her license application at police headquarters, she was surprised to find that the authorities wished to know if she had ever seen a psychiatrist or taken narcotics. She said the process was more intrusive than her application to the state bar association.

''They asked all these probing personal questions that didn't necessarily prove that I, as a thinking person, could or couldn't handle a gun,'' she said.

Generally speaking, Ms. Heath goes light on the activism at the meetings, leaving politics to the politicos. This may be why Patrick Brophy, director of political activities for the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, was standing around at the meeting last month dressed in a rep tie and expensive-looking suit.

Mr. Brophy is not that busy, given that his political action committee did not support a single state official from any New York City district last year, which leaves him time to plug the merits of shooting at league meetings, at least when reporters are around.

''People who perhaps have never had the opportunity to enjoy the shooting sports should have that opportunity,'' he said, quickly adding, ''without any preconceived notions.''

Notions are one thing; politics is another. It seemed as if the women of the shooting league had simpler things in mind.

''Oh, yeah, I had a great time,'' one young woman said coming off the line. ''I shot some balloons.''

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A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2004, on Page B00001 of the National edition with the headline: Female Bonding, Punctuated by Gunfire; Every First Monday, a Shooting Club Contradicts a New York Stereotype. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe